The Killing · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 7 January 2007
S1E1 Episode 1
THE MOMENT Lund's decision to stay - to take one more look at one more detail - establishes the obsessive logic that will drive every episode of the series.
The premiere introduces Nanna Birk Larsen's disappearance on a Saturday night, Sarah Lund preparing to leave Copenhagen for a new life, and a political campaign that will intersect with the investigation in ways nobody onscreen yet suspects. The cold, flat photography of Copenhagen in November sets the register immediately.
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The Killing Season 1 Episode 1 aired January 7, 2007 on DR1 as the premiere of the twenty-episode first season. The season won the BAFTA Award for Best International Series in 2011; UK audience appreciation figures reached 94 percent. The Hollywood Reporter called it 'the best series currently on TV - absorbing, addictive, and emotionally devastating.' The premiere introduces Nanna Birk Larsen's disappearance on a Saturday night, Sarah Lund preparing to leave Copenhagen for a new life, and a political campaign that will intersect with the investigation in ways nobody onscreen yet suspects. The cold, flat photography of Copenhagen in November sets the register immediately: this is not crime drama as genre entertainment but crime drama as social portraiture. Sofie Grabol's Lund is established as a detective whose obsessiveness reads as both professional excellence and personal pathology from the first hour.